BWPA North West Members Meet Spitfire Girls
On Saturday 21 March, the BWPA Northwest Region gathered in Buxton with a sense of homecoming. They were there to see Spitfire Girls, the stage play that honours the Air Transport Auxiliary at Buxton Opera House—and in that moment, the circle closed on eighty years of history.
Few people know that the British Women Pilots’ Association existence is intertwined with the ATA. In 1939, as war threatened, the ATA was born from necessity: ferrying aircraft across Britain freed up military pilots for combat. Among those ferrying Spitfires across the country were women. When the war ended and the ATA disbanded, those pioneering pilots didn’t fade away. They organised. They persisted. Many continued in Aviation and in a bid to help and inspire more women to make a career or hobby from aviation, some of them formed the BWPA.
Jackie Moggridge, one of those ATA pilots, became a founder of the association we know today. She and her peers understood something vital: aviation isn’t a man’s world. It never was, really—it just needed some brave women willing to prove it.
Watching Spitfire Girls in Buxton felt like a conversation across time. Here were actors bringing to life the determination, humour, and sheer nerve of the women who came before. The BWPA members sat in the audience and saw themselves reflected in a different era—the same spirit, the same refusal to be grounded. It was an excellent production by Tilted wig, well worth going to watch as it continues its tour of the country.
Meeting the cast backstage was a pleasure. The photographs from that evening capture something important: the bridge between past and present, between the ATA of the 1940s and the BWPA of today.
The ATA’s contribution to the Second World War effort is sometimes overlooked. Ferrying over 300,000 aircraft without a single navigational aid, in all weather, often in unfamiliar planes—it was skilled, dangerous work. And women did it as capably as anyone. They proved something that didn’t need proving, but did need witnessing.
That’s what Spitfire Girls does. It witnesses. It celebrates. And when the BWPA walks into that theatre, it’s not just watching a play—it’s honouring the lineage, the legacy, the stubborn refusal of women to be told they don’t belong in the sky.
As the BWPA works to inspire the next generation of women pilots, Spitfire Girls reminds us why it matters. Not because flying is remarkable for women—it’s just flying. But because saying “yes, women can do this” then made it easier to say it now. And making it easy to say it now means someone, somewhere, will look up at the sky and think: that could be me.
That’s the spirit of the ATA. That’s the mission of the BWPA. And that’s what made an afternoon at the theatre in Buxton feel like something much bigger—like history, recognising itself in the mirror. It was a lovely day to spend with friends and fellow aviators and hopefully there’ll be many more days like this for the BWPA ahead.
For more about the BWPA history and it’s connection to the ATA, feel free to contact a member of the BWPA Heritage Team who look after our vast archive at archive@bwpa.co.uk and watch the website for more articles.
